Posts Tagged ‘The Witcher 3’

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [official site] is only a couple of days away! The final adventure of Geralt of Rivia, and CD Projekt’s chance to prove that they can take the RPG skills they’ve honed in the first two games to a sweeping open world. We’ll have a review up for you as soon as possible, but until then, here’s some CliffsNotes to get you up to speed on what’s happening, where to buy it, and why you haven’t already seen a WIT.

I was travelling into the forest with a hunter who had seen a griffin slay dozens of men and women. The ground was still puddled with blood from its most recent massacre, but it was another act of violence that drew my attention. In conversation, the hunter revealed that he was chased from his village because his neighbors discovered that he was gay. Now he lives by himself, away from the judging eyes of his peers. Despite being forced from society, he still helps bring an end to the griffin, to relieve those who shunned him of further suffering.

“Even though it’s a fantasy game, we want to make sure that it feels real,” said Jonas Mattsson, senior environmental artist at CD Projekt Red. Reaching that goal begins with how people are presented in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (official site), the first three hours of which I’ve now played.

For the past decade I’ve done the financially responsible thing and bought a mid-tier PC and stuck with it till it was melting, crashing, rubble around my feet, but last year I bought something properly top-end for the first time ever. A good thing, because it means it no longer reboots as soon as I load a game. A good thing, because I have a thousand tabs open right now and Chrome needs all the memory it can get. A good thing, if The Witcher 3‘s system requirements are anything to go by, since even the minimum spec is unusually steep. The full details are below.

Some of the claims in this new The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt trailer sound awfully familiar, especially those to do with the NPCs living in cities. They have their own lives and motivations! They have an opinion of you based on your actions! They’ll gossip about you in public! Have you heard of the Gray Fox?

I’m skeptical. Adam is skeptical. But then, it does look golly pretty, so these five minutes of travelling across its world and fighting monsters is worth your time.

There were so many great games in Cologne this year and yet I decided that the first thing I’d write about from the show would be the one disappointment. Maybe disappointment comes more naturally to me or maybe I just wanted to get it out of the way – whatever the case, later that evening, I was slightly annoyed with myself for sending a grumpy dispatch rather than a chronicle of the good times. The Witcher 3 presentation that I watched is now online, so you can watch it for yourself below, and then use the comments section to solemnly agree with my judgement, or to thank me. Because if you do enjoy the video, it’s thanks to the expectations that I so graciously lowered.

The megabooths have been disassembled, the lanyards have been discarded and the crowds have dissipated – Gamescom has run its course for another year. RPS sent its two best Smiths to Cologne last week. Their brief was to see the games, talk to the creators and meet as many terrifying mechanical puppets as possible. They succeeded on all fronts and returned with tales of Elite: Dangerous, Pathologic, Warhammer and Dead Island, among many other delights and disappointments. Here are their thoughts on the show as a whole, along with a few highlights.

You like The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt screenshots. I know you. You can’t resist them! Six new ones have emerged from Gamescom, which is a small gathering of gaming enthusiasts in Germany. Because you’ve been good, if you click on the pictures, they’ll get extra-big. Big enough that you could use them as a desktop background, and pretend you’re playing The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt on your PC right now! For the complete inexperience, you could lay the words “INSERT COIN” over the image, and then bash at your mouse and keyboard constantly imagining that you’re having some notion of control.

There’s also a trailer of old Mr Witchy completing a mission, but one thing at a time.

Here’s some very good news: CD Projekt Red are keeping their promise, and The Witcher 3 is to feature no DRM whatsoever. It’s odd, because they feel like the sort of company that never would in the first place – what with their connections to GOG and all. But CDP have stuck their fingers in the icky pot of DRM in the past. And of course they were embroiled in the epically dick move of threatening alleged pirates with bullying lawsuits. It seems that this ill behaviour is behind them now, and they’re making efforts to reassure people that there’s to be not a drip of DRM in The Witcher 3. Hoorah!

There is scant information about there about Lords Of The Fallen, even though it was first announced (as Project RPG) a year ago. The game from The Deck 13, headed by former CD Projekt Red dev Tomasz Gop, doesn’t have a website, nor even an entry in secret industry tome Gamespress. Yet the game that people seem to be pitching as a rival to The Witcher 3 has managed to produce some screenshots despite it all.

Once upon a time, CD Projekt studio manager Adam Badowski announced that he was strongly mulling the possibility of giving Geralt’s one-man show a multiplayer makeover. That was, of course, met with the gnashing of teeth and braying of donkeys, as very few people have picked up The Witcher and said, “Gee, I sure would love to see this sprawling story chopped up into a series of generic deathmatch modes.” And even fewer donkeys. Fortunately, when I spoke with CDP during GDC, it sounded like they were having some very strong second thoughts. And now, sure enough, The Witcher 3‘s proposed multiplayer mode is no more.

If you think about it, Geralt’s basically a bunch of super cool dudes packed into one hyper-dude, by which all other dudes are judged. I mean, he wields two swords, has lived multiple lives between his various states of memory having-ness, and is approximately 22 million times lustier than the average bear. Also, his newfound beard is considered an above average bear by most leading ecologists and bear raters. So basically, he doesn’t need multiplayer. He’s more than multifaceted enough all by his lonesome. Red flags were raised, then, when CD Projekt studio manager Adam Badowski strongly hinted that multiplayer’s in the works for The Witcher 3. During GDC, however, I had the opportunity to clarify the issue, and – whether the traditionally single-player epic sprouts a mound of hydra-like new heads or not – CDP insists that it has no intention of giving fans reason to worry.

Geralt has a beard now. We know this much for certain. Oh, and I suppose he’s also got that whole open-world thing going on. But adding a new number to your title’s a big responsibility, and a simple promise that you’ll feed it, water it, and add boats for some reason (because year of the bow is over; hopefully year of the boat will be a worthy successor) doesn’t always cut it. So what else is going into The Witcher trilogy’s 50-100-hour swan song? To hear CD Projekt tell it, pretty much everything they could think of. The Witcher 3’s scope is beyond ambitious, but that doesn’t mean the Polish powerhouse is skimping on details. Read on to see senior quest designer Jakub Rokosz and marketing mastermind Michał Platkow-Gilewski discuss revamped combat, managing difficulty/learning curve, how big of an impact choices can have, using sex for the benefit – not detriment – of story, and what multiplatform development from the get-go means for the PC version. It’s all after the break.